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What about at night?

Fortunately the wind blows at night. Here is a wind resources map for the United States. Lots and lots of consistently windy areas. Wind is cheaper than solar currently and in nine out the ten nations that top the renewable energy charts, there is more wind capacity than solar, and this is likely to remain the case.

With the use of high voltage DC transmission lines (a technology that has been in use since 1930) electricity can be shipped coast to coast with minor losses. 800 KV lines can transport electricity from one coast to the other with about the same losses as existing grids, about 6%. Constructing a national long distance electrical "highway" makes most of the "problems" perceived with renewable energy disappear. Just like now, there is not going to be just one source of power in the future, so solar does not have to do it all.

Even is solar "only" supplies the daytime peak load, this is half of the total electricity demand. In North America it is convenient that 40% of the entire U.S. population lives on the Eastern Seaboard, so that when it has its evening demand peak, the sunny west is three hours earlier and would still be producing a lot of solar electricity. Then there are proven power storage technologies like pumped water storage. Just considering existing pumped storage capacity, and capacity expansion that has applied for permits, we are looking at 76.7 GW of PS capacity in the U.S. which is 7.5% of U.S. peak electricity demand.

The problem is that most sites for the first two categories are either already taken or politically difficult...

The map on page 25 of this NREL document does a good job of showing potential conventional hydropower by state, separated by already developed, excluded (your political difficulties, mostly), and undeveloped. There are significant amounts of undeveloped hydro, mostly in the West.

Electricity is, and is likely to remain, a regional thing. The US doesn't have a single power grid; it has three -- Eastern, Western, and Texas -- that are almost completely independent of one another. The Western area is particularly rich in a variety of renewable sources, many located relatively close to the population/demand centers. The Texas area has a more limited set of resources available. The Eastern, particularly compared to its total population and demand, is poor in renewables. In addition, the Eastern's best renewable resources are quite far from the big population centers.

Although very generous, I think it's a bit of a stretch to call Google's grant to SMU a "collaboration", or to only mention Google and omit any mention of USDOE and other entities that have been funding this research at SMU and elsewhere for many years. For example, this this report from 2006, which points out the potential of the thermal hotspot in West Virginia...

It doesn't have the cool Google Earth graphics, however.

Not that we shouldn't build HDR plants where they make sense, but good luck building them in Florida (or anywhere in the lower 48 states of the US east of the Rockies). The rock just isn't hot enough, even at 6km.

Concentrating solar is already down to about $0.09-$0.12/kWh, which isn't surprising since it uses reflectors instead of photovoltaics. As the size of the installation goes up, the cost per unit of energy goes down and the size of the heat reservoir goes up. That means, a really big installation could act as a massive battery, allowing it to continue delivering energy even when the sky goes dark for days at a time. Also remember that the energy generation is indirect: sun heats oil, which in turn heats water to drive a steam turbine. It would be perfectly reasonable to have an alternative method of heating the oil (natural gas, for example) if Mr. Burns temporarily disables the sun.

In short, your main objection (that people need a steady source of power) is irrelevant. Hospital life support won't fail, air conditioning won't give out, and cities won't resort to cannibalism because they've lost Internet access.

Your claim that geothermal only works in Iceland is bogus as well. Geothermal heating and cooling can work just about anywhere, even with tiny, single home installations. Electricity generation is more capital-intensive, but the expense is mostly a product of the depth to which you have to drill and pump to extract the heat. Thanks to frantic research by the oil industry, we're getting much better at that sort of thing. According to this recent study, a pitifully small amount of government-funded R&D could turn geothermal into a major supplier of power for the U.S. The report is over 300 pages long, but you only really need to read chapter 1.

Re: $10000/year. In this case, I was merely trying to point out the fallacy of the original poster's implication that reducing CO2 emissions could only be done by making our lives 80% suckier. But, yes, I am something of a collectivist. We've seen the failures of unmitigated corporate capitalism around the globe, from Iraq to Russia to South America, and people are frankly sick of it. Strong welfare states that represent the interests of the people they govern do far better at alleviating poverty and producing useful economic work than statist corporate regimes.

Read Naomi Klein's The Shock Doctrine, and maybe you'll think differently about the benevolence of our corporate overlords, and perhaps consider the hidden costs of our almighty "standard of living."

I disagree with the statement that nuclear is the only alternative we have. With the invention of the "hot dry rock" geothermal method, geothermal is now a practical alternative and suitable for base load power. What this means is that almost anywhere we drill (6-10 km down) we can make a power plant.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geothermal_power
If you don't believe me check the MIT report, actually it should be read anyway. The report is a fascinating read and estimates that the resource is around 13000 ZJ, with 2000 ZJ being extractable.
The MIT report -- http://geothermal.inel.gov/publications/future_of_geothermal_energy.pdf

Darn, I already posted or I would have modded this up.

Here's the report (14 MB PDF.)

No doubt. And you can see this on NYTimes.com; I emailed them. How long do you think they will take to correct this?

Why would they correct something that they didn't get wrong? Just because a few slashdotters don't feel that the number cited is correct, you're going to tell them that they're wrong? How about doing three minutes of research to find out for yourself first? Let's hear it for "Citizen Journalism", where truthiness is more important than facts.

And for those of you playing at home, the relevent passage from the MIT study (press release here) (actual study here) [PDF warning] is this:
Based on growing markets in the United States for clean, base-load capacity, the panel thinks that with a combined public/private investment of about $800 million to $1 billion over a 15-year period, EGS technology could be deployed commercially on a timescale that would produce more than 100,000 MWe or 100 GWe of new capacity by 2050. This amount is approximately equivalent to the total R&D investment made in the past 30 years to EGS internationally, which is still less than the cost of a single, new-generation, clean-coal power plant.

The biggest problem with hybrids (particularly the plug-in types that put extra strain on the batteries) is that the eco-freaks fail to consider the environmental costs of replacing the car's battery every 2-5 years.

Read the actual study. This doesn't look that promising.

First, this isn't a renewable resource. Over time, the rock cools, and more wells have to be drilled. "If there is no temperature decline, then the heat is not being efficiently removed from the rock. If there is too much temperature decline, either the reservoir must be replaced by drilling and fracturing new rock volume, or the efficiency of the surface equipment will be reduced and project economics will suffer."

Second, outside of the few locations where you can get steam at 200-300C from shallow holes, the thermal performance of these systems is unimpressive. Efficiency = (Tin - Tout) / Tout, with temperatures measured from absolute zero, remember. So you need big low-pressure steam systems to extract the power. It's 1890s steam technology, low temperature and low pressure. The study assumes that the systems for recovering energy from low-grade steam will improve in efficiency, but heat exchangers and steam turbines have been developed for well over a century, and are mature technologies.

Worse, most of the good locations are in the empty parts of the United States. Idaho, Wyoming, Colorado, inland Oregon, and northern Utah have the best heat reservoirs. East of the Mississippi, zilch. (See fig. 1.4) Electricity would have to be transmitted thousands of miles to be useful, and there's no local use for the waste heat. Hawaii looks promising, but that's because it has cities near volcanoes.

Several experimental plants have been built since 1980, and none of them could even pay their own operating costs, let alone recover their capital cost. (Too many DoE "demonstration projects" are like that.) The study actually doesn't recommend building power plants. It recommends ... another study.

Unless you were to construct a nuclear power plant to directly heat the titanium oxide mixture using the reactor pile itself.

Unfortunatley, the world market for radioactive titanium is rather small.

You will need some sort of high temperature heat exchanger that will not, itself, become radioactive. I don't think water will do. Actually, you may have trouble just running the reactor that hot. I think you will need a gaseous core reactor.

http://gif.inel.gov/roadmap/pdfs/non-classical_rea ctor_systems.pdf

That's rather beyond the current state of the art.

a gallon of gasoline weighing about 8 pounds has the same energy as one ton of conventional lead-acid storage batteries.

Even if much improved storage batteries were devised

they cannot compete with gasoline or diesel fuel in energy density.

the construction of an average car also consumes 120,000 gallons of fresh water

Scientists are already warning us to get ready for massive "water wars."

While it is true that at the supply of cheap fissile Uranium-235 (the fuel for conventional nuclear reactors) could possibly run out within 50-100 years, options such as fast breeder reactors and thorium-based fuel cycles have the capability to continue fueling conventional reactors for hundreds of years. The advanced reactors can run on abundant resources while producing excess fissile material. They actually produce more fuel than they burn. They also can process spent fuel (nuclear waste), converting most of it into usable fuel and the rest of it to a form that will only be of concern for 500 years as opposed to 100s of thousands. The advanced reactors could produce enough electricity using only the accumulated nuclear waste in the USA to power the whole country for at least 200 years. That's something worth looking into.

Believe it or not, but George Bush has already proposed and funded the Global Nuclear Energy Partnership (GNEP), which utilizes advanced reactors to ensure a supply of nuclear fuel well into the future. Development of the advanced reactors has been underway since the 60s but now it is really picking up again. In my Nuclear Engineering department at The University of Michigan, for one, there are a group of professors and graduate students devoting lots of time to designing fuel cycles and looking at safety concerns of sodium-cooled fast-reactors, one particular option for the advanced reactors.

The advanced concepts will not be ready to be deployed for at least 15 years at best. So keep up the good words for nuclear power and we'll have an environmentally safe energy source. For more information on what the nuclear community is looking into, check out the generation 4 roadmap at: http://gif.inel.gov/roadmap/

Well, according to this Gen IV roadmap, they're looking at a variety of technical solutions, but it's very much an R&D phase for probably the next 20 years. Actual near-term deployment of new reactors (the stuff they're talking about in the US for 2014+, and which some in the nuclear industry maybe trying to pass off as a new generation of reactors) are basically standardized versions of current systems; certainly not of the integral fast reactor type.

That's what you get for living in the desert. You countered the parent post, who said that freshwater is plentiful in most of the US by saying that in a couple places in California, there is need for conservation. I hate to burst your bubble, but California is not "most" of the US. Come to the Mississippi river area and tell me there's not enough water.

The problem in California is blatantly ignored by most Californians. Developments continue in most parts of (at least) Southern California despite the fact that the the water supply can't handle the growth. "Everyone" wants to live there but there aren't the resources to support everyone. The problem in California is quite significant to the rest of the country, despite the Mississippi being full of water. California's economy, if it were an independent nation, would be the fifth largest in the world. Its responsible for 14% of the US GDP - $1.5 trillion dollars in 2004. 12% of Americans live in California (more people than in all of Canada) - and that doesn't include illegal aliens.

The Grandparent's basic statement that a clean freshwater supply is, "Not a problem here" is selfish and ignorant. Yes, if fewer people were dumb enough to live in California, then they wouldn't have (as bad of) a problem. But with a powerful economy, a reasonably high average income, and many jobs, there's a reason people are dry in the desert.

Despite the opinions of many Californians I've met, the universe does not revolve solely around them, or their state. Water shortages are rarely an issue in the U.S., outside of California (and I suspect probably mostly only Southern California) and the Southwestern states -- the only exception being the odd seasonal shortage during a bad summer drought in other places, or if the water supply is contaminated for some reason.

No, the universe doesn't revolve solely around Californians, but I've generally found that most Americans think that they already live on the greenest side of the fence. Outside of California water shortages may not be a big problem, but large parts of the US are not as densely populated either. Montana doesn't seem to have water problems. Yay, you win! Oh, wait, that doesn't solve California's problem.

As for water contamination in the US - its a bigger problem that you're aware of. Just because there's water coming out of the taps in your house doesn't mean that its not contaminated.

The Colorado river is tainted with heavy metals after passing through mining tailings in southern Utah (Moab). California drinks the Colorado so dry that the Gulf of California receives very little "fresh" water and is becoming increasingly salinated. Its becoming so salty that the fish population is disappearing. This is naturally having a negative impact on the local population.

The INL, formerly known as the INEEL developed the first nuclear reactors. Nearby Arco Idaho is the first town in the world to be powered by nuclear power. However, how do you run Nuclear reactors in the middle of old lava beds (equivalent to desert)? How do you provide cooling? Oh, there's a large aquifer - the Snake River aquifer? Yes, lets use that. Funny, where does the Snake River end? So yes, there's lots of water in the Mississippi, but is it clean? Is it safe?

Ironically there is now a division of

That's what you get for living in the desert. You countered the parent post, who said that freshwater is plentiful in most of the US by saying that in a couple places in California, there is need for conservation. I hate to burst your bubble, but California is not "most" of the US. Come to the Mississippi river area and tell me there's not enough water.

The problem in California is blatantly ignored by most Californians. Developments continue in most parts of (at least) Southern California despite the fact that the the water supply can't handle the growth. "Everyone" wants to live there but there aren't the resources to support everyone. The problem in California is quite significant to the rest of the country, despite the Mississippi being full of water. California's economy, if it were an independent nation, would be the fifth largest in the world. Its responsible for 14% of the US GDP - $1.5 trillion dollars in 2004. 12% of Americans live in California (more people than in all of Canada) - and that doesn't include illegal aliens.

The Grandparent's basic statement that a clean freshwater supply is, "Not a problem here" is selfish and ignorant. Yes, if fewer people were dumb enough to live in California, then they wouldn't have (as bad of) a problem. But with a powerful economy, a reasonably high average income, and many jobs, there's a reason people are dry in the desert.

Despite the opinions of many Californians I've met, the universe does not revolve solely around them, or their state. Water shortages are rarely an issue in the U.S., outside of California (and I suspect probably mostly only Southern California) and the Southwestern states -- the only exception being the odd seasonal shortage during a bad summer drought in other places, or if the water supply is contaminated for some reason.

No, the universe doesn't revolve solely around Californians, but I've generally found that most Americans think that they already live on the greenest side of the fence. Outside of California water shortages may not be a big problem, but large parts of the US are not as densely populated either. Montana doesn't seem to have water problems. Yay, you win! Oh, wait, that doesn't solve California's problem.

As for water contamination in the US - its a bigger problem that you're aware of. Just because there's water coming out of the taps in your house doesn't mean that its not contaminated.

The Colorado river is tainted with heavy metals after passing through mining tailings in southern Utah (Moab). California drinks the Colorado so dry that the Gulf of California receives very little "fresh" water and is becoming increasingly salinated. Its becoming so salty that the fish population is disappearing. This is naturally having a negative impact on the local population.

The INL, formerly known as the INEEL developed the first nuclear reactors. Nearby Arco Idaho is the first town in the world to be powered by nuclear power. However, how do you run Nuclear reactors in the middle of old lava beds (equivalent to desert)? How do you provide cooling? Oh, there's a large aquifer - the Snake River aquifer? Yes, lets use that. Funny, where does the Snake River end? So yes, there's lots of water in the Mississippi, but is it clean? Is it safe?

Ironically there is now a division of

If the Nuclear Power Industry delivers this, it will likely place the price of electricity produced at around 3 US cents per KW-Hr.

Note that this is a big IF and the price is very sensitive to construction time and discount rate. Those are two assumptions that have been known to change fairly dramatically. (Wind is more sensitive to discount rates, and tends to have shorter construction times.)

Its not that big an 'if'. Overall, the AP1000 uses about 80% less materials than current generation II reactors, and has an expected operating cost of < .01/kWh, because it relies on passive safety rather than active safety. And since the parts are assembly-driven, there isn't the 'handmade' expense involved in construction that there was with second generation nuke plants.

Quoting upfront capital costs alone is rather useless- the important figure is the adjusted cost per KiloWatt-Hour. In this respect, wind is on course to beat these estimates from the nuclear industry. Even if this specific technology doesn't pan out, the trend is clear. And at $0.02/kWh, it will very likely be cheap enough to provide baseline power when coupled with hydrogen storage.

Well, I read awea's estimates for current wind energy costs, and they listed $.04/kwH, and I'm not sure what they've been huffing, but I work at a large utility (not in the wind-side of things but I have access to the numbers), and I can tell you that we get $.06/kwH if we are lucky - and that is just in generating the power on even the more modern units, not talking about startup costs. The turbines have to be cleaned, monitored for breakage, the distributed nature means that if there is a fault it takes a longer time to track down, truckrolls have to be done more often, and we can't rely on it for the basepower reasons mentioned here. They are basically a PITA.

On the other hand, our average operating cost *right now* for a nuke plant is approx $.015/kWH - and that is likely to drop down to less than $.01/kwH in the next generation. And when generation 4 kicks in, nukes will likely do co-generation, both doing electricity and hydrogen, when the operating temperature gets up to 1000 degrees C. Then you don't neet electrolysis; you can split hydrogen from oxygen directly using thermochemical reaction and get *real* high efficiencies for input > 80%. Here's a good site discussing this: gen IV reactors

Don't get me wrong, I like wind as much as the next guy, but its got a long, long, long, long way to go. IMO. It'll probably get there, yes, but I doubt it will ever be cost-effective for base conversion. And even if it does, I think throwing away *any* technology for energy right now would be tantamount to suicide.

Ed

Their setup: The 'crystal' mentioned in the mainstream articles, is a z-cut lithium tantalate crystal (LiTaO3), with the negative axis facing outward onto a hollow copper block. A tiny tungsten probe (80 microns long and 100 nm wide) is then attached to the other crystal face. This probe acts as a tiny mast for the electric field so that there is a powerful electrical field at the tip of the probe. Then there were a bunch of fancy neutron-counters and single-photon counters bundled around it.

What they did: First they added deuterium gas (at 0.7 Pa) and then cooled the crystal down using liquid nitrogen (to 240 K). Then they used a little heater to increase the chamber temperature slowly.

What happened: Less than 3 minutes later, and still below 273 K (0 degrees Celcius), the neutron signal rose above the background level. There were x-rays coming from the probe tip, and a whole bunch of neutrons. After a few more minutes, the electric field was so strong that it caused arcing between the probe tip and the enclosure (because they kept heatingthe crystal, and the field thus kept getting stronger). The arcing stopped the process (and I'd guess it damages the crystal?).

They added a few links in the article to previous papers: a pdf describing the concept they are trying to harness, another pdf with more about how they use the crystals with the deuterium gas, and a brief abstract.

I think this is pretty cool. I bet/hope that before long (within 10 years), this will be powering small extrasolar probes.

Pretty neat stuff. I don't even mind dupe posts when they're on such important stuff.

Well, I'm the son of a nuclear engineer, and I've also had more than a year's worth of engineering-level college physics, so I have had to learn a little bit more about the subject than the average joe. I have also met and talked at length with people from the Idaho National Engineering Laboratory where they have done some very incredible research. This is also where the first nuclear power electric generating plant in the world was built (not the first nuclear reactor, however).

If you want to see something that is a terrible waste of fantastic technologies due to raw politics, try to research what happened to the Breeder Reactor program at INEL. They have effectively found a way to build a nuclear fision reactor that can actually consume radioactive waste from other reactors and turn it into something harmless. If this research was to continue, there would be absolutely no need for Yucca Mountain in Nevada.

The dark side of this research is that the same reactor can effectively make better than bomb-grade Plutonium using the same techniques, and there are some other national security issues that turns this into a political mess. Also, I think there are members of the United States Senate who really want to spread large quantities of radioactive waste all over America. It has to be deliberate, because the useful benefits to our country far outnumber the risks that this research could lead us to.

Of course the Farnsworth Fusor technology has been equally neglected, but that is another story.

I think some important info is missing; maybe when they "announce" Monday there will be more. The INEEL website (that's where the quoted guy works) has a diagram that seems to be showing how this works. At first I thought the article was wrong, and they meant electrolyis with heat but without electricity, but the diagram does show electricity going in.

I think most folks in the /. world consider IT to be the 'tech' industry. Not surprising due to the backgrounds of the people who read/post here. As for 'tech' jobs, there are quite a few in my region of the technology world:

LLNL has 20 open S&E positions.

INEEL in the middle of transitioning contractors, but will undoubtedly need S&Es to complete missions for DOE and the Navy.

LBL has 95 open S&E positions.

BNL has 7 open S&E positions.

SNL has 20 open S&E positions.

LANL has 107 open S&E positions.

ORNL has 28 open S&E positions.

PNNL has 36 open S&E positions.

ANL has 32 open S&E positions.

There complete list of laboratories is here. All of them have job postings in the S&E categories. These just happen to be the largest insitutions.

I haven't even started searching Monster.com

Cosmic Radiation makes up about 8% of the 360 mREM annual average background dose someone in the US receives. See the National Council on Radiation Protection and Measurements NCRP 93, 1988, for more information. Murray's "Nuclear Energy" has a pie chart of all sources and might be in your local library. This looks good too.

If you have a Sodium Iodine detector set and a scope, you can see it. Most common energies seen are around 20 MeV. They are big pulses next to the puny normal ones but you will detect one every twenty seconds or so.

You are correct, however, to note that most of these particles are blocked by the atmosphere and that you do get dosed at higher elevations. A person at 80,000 ft. according to the lesson plan cited above, gets about 10 R/hr. Each hour that's five hundred times the dose you get per year on the surface, ouch. By comparison, plants have a cow if you get more than a few unplanned mR.

Hah, I hope you don't get your hydrogen by reducing it from methane :)

I visited INEL once during a vacation, and saw some "first" reactor in a museum. It was cool.

Truly, people are irrationally scared of radioactivity. They don't realize how much information has been built up on the subject, and all the advances in the field.

Here's the INEL press release on calcining. They mention that the waste processed was from uranium extraction. Hanford is plutonium, though, so maybe they can't use this process on their waste.

From this page:

In 1999, The U. S Postal Service contracted with Ford Motor Company for the purchase of 500 Electric Carrier Route Vehicles (ECRVs). The ECRVs were phased into service at 22 Post Office locations --- with 200 in California and two on the East Coast --- between February 2001 and October of 2002.

So yes, USPS may well be be a potential customer of Azure Dynamics. But Azure Dynamics who is somewhat late to that particular game. So far they are providing two test vehicles to the USPS. If Azure Dynamics is to do well, it'll have to be because their cars are damn good, rather than being the first ones on the block.

In fact, US government fleets have been participating in the FreedomCAR & Vehicle Technologies Program during both the Clinton and Bush administrations.

President Bush greatly increased this program's funding and gave it the (kinda bizarre) name "FreedomCAR." But of course this fits into neither the conservative nor the liberal simplistic mythologies of what the Bush administration is 'all about' (i.e. fight-for-freedom vs. exploit-oil), so it's not surprising that practically no one is aware of it. The media these days is about 90% devoted to telling moralistic tales intended to illustrate a point, rather than to convey facts.

No offense, but you have no idea what you're talking about.

If I were to trust anyone to build an "out of this world aircraft", it would be Burt Rutan. Burt has designed some of the most exotic, and popular, experimental homebuilts ever. (Ever hear of a VariViggen, VariEze, Quickie, Defiant, or Long-EZ?) When I went to Oshkosh a few years ago, I saw hundreds of Vari-Ezes and Long-EZs. He has built aircraft that has broken records, such as Voyager the first aircraft to fly around the world without refueling and the Boomerang a completely asymmetrical aircraft! (BTW, even though the link is to a computer generated pic, I saw the actual one closeup, firsthand at Oshkosh... talk about a COOL aircraft!)

The man is a legend in the experimental aircraft world... and probably more knowledgable about real-world flight characteristics than anyone! He has introduced dozens of successful, cutting-edge aircraft designs that are currently flown by hundreds, if not thousands, of pilots.

Your claim that "experts" should only get involved reminds me of the closing scene in Raiders of the Lost Ark. "Which experts?"... "TOP experts"...

This man IS the expert!

Not to pick but as a former MM on the Enterprise she was originally designed, and currently contains 8 reactors. All Nimitz class carriers contain 2 reactors.

You are correct that each reactor could power a small city. The prototype I attended in Idaho at the INEL (now INEEL) actually supplied power from the A1W and S1W reactors to a small local city. The power companies did not like this and had congress stop this in the 60s.

Additionally, as of this posting, no one has mentioned that the Navy's reactors contain highly enriched reactors. It would be cost prohibitive for civilian reactors to enrich their fuel to the levels of the USN.

BTW I am posting anonymously due to mod points that I have all ready doled out on this thread. I post as Yazheirx

Any Geek tour of America should include the following sites:

The NSA National Cryptologic Musuem

The INEEL nuclear labs in Idaho - Home of the world's first nuclear power generation facility.

Tour of the Hanford Site near Richland, Washington. Home of the worlds first large-scale nuclear reactor for production of weapons grade plutonium. Nuclear reactors, Plutonium Generation plants, lots of nuclear waste,... a must see!

Grand Coulee Dam, The largest hydroelectric dam in North America and one of the largest in the world.

If you're in the area you might also want to visit one of the various lower Dams on the Columbia and Snake rivers, which feature huge locks for transporting boats and barges above the dams.

If your into Natural Disasters and biological recovery, visit Mount St. Helens, the volcano that erupted in 1980.

Not exactly a factory, but I highly recommend touring EBR-I (Experimental Breeder Reactor I) if you are anywhere near the INEEL Facility in Idaho. This is the coolest facility I've toured *ever*. For those of you who don't know, this is the place where electricity was first generated by nuclear power.

Not exactly a factory, but I highly recommend touring EBR-I (Experimental Breeder Reactor I) if you are anywhere near the INEEL Facility in Idaho. This is the coolest facility I've toured *ever*. For those of you who don't know, this is the place where electricity was first generated by nuclear power.

1) Big Brutus, in West Mineral, Kansas - the second largest electric shovel in the world, and (IIRC) the only one still in (more or less) one piece. If you are in Branson, MO you are a couple of hours out.

2) The Kansas Cosmosphere and Space Center, Hutchinson, Kansas. See where Apollo 13 and Liberty Bell were restored, and (in a couple of months) watch them restore a V2 rocket (and even help them do it!). (While here, if it isn't Sunday, get directions to The Carrage Crossing restaurant).

3) EBR-1 the world's first breeder reactor, and the first reactor to make electric power, just outside Arco, Idaho (first city to be powered by nuclear power) (while here, you can go through Craters of the Moon National Park, one of the places that the Apollo astronauts trained. Stay in the DK inn, and you have a good chance of staying in one of the rooms they stayed in).
4) The Very Large Array, outside Socorro, New Mexico. While here, you could also go through White Sands National Park.
5) The London Bridge V2.1 in Lake Havasu, Nevada, where the entire London Bridge was relocated to.
6) The Jefferson National Expansion Memorial a.k.a. The Saint Lewis Arch - there is quite a museum below the arch, and I found it mind-blowing to realize that Saint Lewis is an ocean port.
7) Mount Rushmore National Park - go through the Rushmore Borglum Story for how they carved it and the tricks Borglum used to make the faces look more alive. While there, stop by....
8) Crazy Horse Memorial to see such a work being created.
9) Mesa Verde National Park, near Cortez, Colorado, and Walnut Canyon National Monument, near Flagstaff, AZ, are great examples of how people can eake out a living and build a city where you wouldn't think anybody could survive.

Of course, just look at The National Parks Service website for all sorts of cool places to go.

www.inel.gov

Naval Reactors Facility

The accident report archive. SL-1 info at the bottom of the page in pdf format.

www.inel.gov

Naval Reactors Facility

The accident report archive. SL-1 info at the bottom of the page in pdf format.

Ever hear about the Idaho National Engineering Laboratory? It was put together after WWII for alot of the nuclear projects. Most of the naval nuclear stuff was developed there, and the navy has kept all of it's used cores (think of how many nuclear ships and submarines there have been over the years, and many had more than one core over their lifetime), and you can read about that here:



So, effectively, there IS a long-term storage facility for waste in the U.S.

But what a lot of people don't realize is that there have been some fairly large accidents there. The army had a poorly designed reactor that basically blew up (steam explosion due to extreme power excursion) in 1961. Data on that is availible at the bottom of this page (big pdf's) under the freedom of information act:



There have been other accidents at the INEL and many have released radioactive contaminants to the environment. The effects on the environment, surrounding area, surrounding people have arguably been nil. The location of the INEL makes a lot of sense despite potential geological instability due to it's extremely desolate location. It continues to be a productive facility, and research from it provides valid and viable techniques for environmental cleanup/decontamination effort should an accident occur.

So why fight Yucca? The INEL facility is probably less secure and is certainly more prone to accidents (due to active reactors, testing, etc.) than a facility simply storing spent fuel. The severity of the accidents that have occurred (and the results of decontamination/cleanup) show that environmental impact can be controlled in the case of an accident. It seems like a buried storage facility makes a hell of a lot of sense, but I guess we could vitrify the waste in glass blocks and throw it into the sea as some less scrupulous countries have.

There are a couple of problems with this line of reasoning. First of all, it presumes that you know all of the technical issues to do telepresence (aka Heinlein's "Waldos"). You still have to get the robots/monitoring equipment into place and the sort of equipment you are talking about takes quite a bit of infrastructure in order to get it going. I believe that this is used in parts of the Nuclear Power industry quite a bit, because the risks far and away stronger than the cost of the equipment. Check out the web site for INEEL for some additional information regarding the use of robots as you are suggesting, but in another context.

The other problem is the concept that people just can't live in space. What is going to need to happen for space flight to be exciting again like it was in the early 1960's is to have people up there sticking their nose in places that nobody has ever been to before. A color television just doesn't do the same justice as a human eye, noticing subtle stuff that you would just miss on a monitor. The geology that Harrison Schmitt of Apollo XVII did on the moon just couldn't be duplicated by sending a Viking-style probe to the moon, grabbing a couple of rocks, and coming back to the earth. Much of what we know about lunar geology is due to the efforts of the last three Apollo missions.

It is also unavoidable that people MUST eventually get into space. To doom humanity to this little chunk of rock in an obscure backwater arm of a rather ordinary galaxy is, in my opinion, a great waste of the amazing potential of mankind.

Finally, there is the often quoted phrase "LEO (low-earth orbit) is more than halfway to the rest of the Solar System." If you get a strong human presence in a low orbit environment, it will be essentially trivial to travel anywhere else in the solar system, including Mars, the Asteroids, etc.

Mind you, I am not saying that there wouldn't be tasks that couldn't be done via remote-control. There will be stuff like this, and where appropriate it should be done. Just don't openly dismiss the fact that this is the only option that should be considered.

Low level nuclear waste is already being stored in salt flats in New Mexico. It's the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) near Carlsbad.

Some of my information may be out of date, as I visited the place in the summer of 1994, as part of a DoE program for talented science students. (One student from the 50 states, and a few from overseas. Unsuprisingly, the kids asked harder and more uncomfortable questions than the political delegations that came through. Unlike the delegations, we kids also understood their answers.)

The basic ideal is to tunnel deep into the salt flats and store the waste canisters. These canisters eventually will corrode and crumble to dust. This is not a problem. Remember the salt? Under extreme pressure (like that cause by millions of tons salt), the salt will flow. Over a few decades time the tunnels will close, and permanently entomb the waste.

As for problems: geologically speaking, the salt flats have been around for hundreds of millions of years, and no one is going to live there. There are two problems: 1) water: massive climate change might affect the preciptation in area is that in the future and also possible local water table contamination and 2) someone might mine for salt where the waste is.

Website: Radioactive Waste Management Complex - Background

You replied: "The articles listed seems like some sort of press release."

READ this again, and think about it.

Sometimes the posts just moderate themselves...